Title: Exoplanet Kepler-1649c Discovered By NASA Is Very Similar To Earth!
A "new earth " with Crucial Similarities to our planet
Tonight, before going to bed, take a look at the sky and its stars and try to think about how many
of them host planets. How do stars exist in our galaxy around which planets orbit?
The answer to this question is more than you think.
Wouldn't be nice, if somewhere out there, in one of these planetary systems,
there was an Earth's twin? With an atmosphere, and oceans just like our planet. A miracle planet,
a planet that can host life. Nowadays, astronomers can't think about anything else:
their thoughts and studies are constantly aimed at the search and hunting for exoplanets.
They believe that, if life exists somewhere out there, it's better for us to find it.
Among other things, space telescopes were sent to space with the purpose of finding exoplanets.
And they were pretty good at unveiling their secrets! For example, the Kepler spacecraft,
active from 2009 to 2018, found a lot of exoplanets, and some of them are quite
interesting because they could be orbiting in the so-called habitable zone of their host star.
In particular, one of these planets, called Kepler-1649c,
caught the attention of the scientific community. Follow me in this video to get to know why!
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Do you know what is this? This is the Kepler space telescope.
Designed to survey a portion of Earth's region of the Milky Way to discover Earth-size exoplanets in
or near habitable zones and estimate how many of the billions of stars in the Milky
Way have such planets, Kepler is one of the most known space telescopes of all times.
What this fantastic telescope did is a photometric study of main-sequence stars.
This means it continually monitored the brightness of approximately 150,000 main sequence stars in a
fixed field of view. The main sequence stars are the most common stars in the universe.
In fact, a star spends most of its life in the main sequence phase, before becoming a red
giant and ending its life in the craziest ways. The huge amount of data collected by Kepler - I
repeat 150.000 stars! - was transmitted to Earth and then analyzed to detect periodic dimming
caused by exoplanets that cross in front of their host star.
Basically, the technique used by Kepler in order to find exoplanets
was the so-called transit technique.
If you follow this channel you should already know what the transit method is,
but in case you don't know, here is a link to one of our videos that will explain it better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSU6SCfOLBU&t=307s&ab_channel=InsaneCuriosity
Only planets whose orbits are seen edge-on from Earth could be detected by the telescope.
Kepler observed 530,506 stars and detected 2,662 planets.
Today astronomers are still going through these data. And discoveries keep rolling in.
Scientists, in fact, found a hidden gem: an Earth-size world that may
be capable of supporting life as we know it. Its name is Kepler-1649c.
This cute exoplanet likes circling around a red dwarf star that lies 300 light-years
from Earth. 300 light-years is not such a huge distance in astronomical terms, so this planet
is also kind of “close” to our beautiful Earth. But it is way more productive than our planet.
Kepler-1649c completes one orbit every 19.5 Earth days, which means that,
if you lived on this planet, you would have a birthday party every 19.5 days.
The exoplanet seems to orbit in the so-called “habitable zone”. In short terms, the habitable
zone is the right range of distances where liquid water could exist on a world's surface.
In practical terms, this could be good news but it could also mean nothing
because liquid water is a necessary element for life as we know it, but water alone is
not sufficient. Other conditions have to be satisfied in order for a planet to support life.
"This intriguing, distant world gives us even greater hope that
a second Earth lies among the stars, waiting to be found," Thomas Zurbuchen,
associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement.
But let's see what we actually know about this amazing planet.
The transit method tells us that the planet is just 1.06 times the size of the Earth.
It's crazy if you think that we can infer its mass (and therefore, assuming a spherical shape
for the planet) the average size only by making use of the transit method. What we basically do is
consider the continuous flux of the star before the planet dims its light, and compare it with
the flux coming when the planet lies between us and the star, along our line of sight.
This comparison, the well created by the planet in the flux of the star,
is directly proportional to the size of the planet.
Imagine looking through your telescope and seeing a planet the size of Jupiter crossing the solar
disk. Of course, it would be quite different if Mercury, instead of Jupiter, crossed it.
The amount of light blocked by Jupiter would be way greater.
So Kepler 1649c is just 1.06 times the size of Earth,
and it gets 75% of the stellar energy influx that our planet gets from the sun.
This combination of characteristics makes the newfound world quite special indeed.
But is this the only reason why it's a special planet? Of course not.
Actually, other exoplanets exist with closer sizes to the one of the Earth,
or maybe with more similar temperatures, such as Trappist-1d and TOI 700d.
But...Kepler 1649c is special because there is no other exoplanet that is considered to
be closer to Earth in BOTH of these values that also lies in the habitable zone of its system.
It's really a perfect combo! Kepler observed the planet twice:
the first time was in the first phase of the mission, which lasted until 2013.
The second time was during an extended mission called K2,
which lasted until the spacecraft ran out of fuel.
Needless to say, both of these campaigns were very successful.
And we are not done with the news, because our special planet has a brother, Kepler 1649b.
Like the first one, it orbits the red dwarf, only it is closer.
In fact, it orbits at about half the distance.
For this reason, however, it is probably too hot to support life as we know it.
It's likely Kepler 1649c has an evil and really infernal brother then.
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What else can we say about the Earth-like planet?
Well, we don't know much, and astronomers will probably need to study the planet in more detail.
For example, they know nothing about its atmosphere.
They don't know if it is thick enough or if it got vaporized over time.
Atmospherical properties of planets are strongly related to their temperature,
so a spectroscopic study of the effective temperature of the planet might help us infer some
precious and crucial information about exoplanets and how they formed, and how they evolved.
It's also worth noting that red dwarfs
are not actually the best kind of stars when it comes to life.
They could be gentle, but they could also be cruel.
In fact, red dwarfs unleash powerful flares frequently, especially in their youth,
so planets in their habitable zones may get their atmospheres stripped relatively quickly.
And a planet without atmosphere is like a pizza without tomatoes: uninteresting!
The thing is red dwarfs are incredibly common, making up about 70%
of the Milky Way's stellar population. So it's easy, and quite tempting, to imagine
that conditions conducive to Earth-like life have cropped upon at least a few of their host worlds.
But let's not become desperate! The good news is that statistics are on our side.
The more data we get, the more signs we see pointing to the notion
that potentially habitable and Earth-size exoplanets are common around these kinds of stars.
With red dwarfs almost everywhere around our galaxy, and these small,
potentially habitable and rocky planets around them, the chance one of them
isn't too different from our Earth looks a bit brighter. And we can't wait to find one.
Maybe one day we will find out that Kepler 1649c hosts life, and we will have an interstellar
spaceship that will bring us there, to see new worlds, and see the same stars from a different
perspective in the universe. And when this will happen, we will always remember Kepler,
the first telescope that gave us insights into this new planet that we could call home.
Kepler's huge dataset will keep astronomers occupied for years.
Some of this work involves double-checking, trying to dig up bona fide planets that previous vetting
software had mislabeled as false positives. And there are many false positives in the Kepler data
because lots of things other than orbiting planets can cause stellar brightness dips. For example,
many stars exist in binary systems, and Kepler commonly saw eclipses of one star by its binary
companion, maybe thinking that it was observing a transit when it was not the case at all.
So...what is our next step in terms of trying to find the next "Earth"?
Simple, we keep looking. Plus, we have new crafts
like TESS and CHEOPS that can further go and discover new worlds, and that can give
us an idea of what we will be capable of. One of the big reasons for the creation of
these telescopes was to be better then the Kepler space telescope.
For example, the TESS Mission is designed to survey over
85% of the sky (an area of sky 400 times larger than covered by Kepler) to search for planets
around nearby stars (within ~200 parsecs). Basically, what Kepler did telling us that, on
average, every star has a planet or planets around it. TESS and CHEOPS will take the next steps.
If planets are everywhere, let’s find those orbiting bright, nearby stars because they’ll
be the ones we can now follow up with the existing ground and space-based telescopes, and the next
generation of instruments for decades to come. But could we truly ever find a new Earth?
It's hard to say, but the universe is a big place, and many scientists refuse to believe
that Earth is the only one out there that is this perfect in terms of its position,
composition, atmosphere, and more. Of course, we really have to make
huge leaps further in technology, before we can take the next steps toward a New Earth.
The best we can do at present, and what we are doing, is focus on the Moon
and Mars missions that might result in colonies being born.
The biggest problem though is time, travel, and process.
Any colony will take months if not years to make,
and the travel to get to the moon, and especially to Mars, isn't easy,
or reliable if you think about it. And the work that'll need to be done
in order to get a colony made? Not simple, nor basic.
And I'm sure to some of you it may seem folly that we're almost desperate to find another
Earth. But the truth is, we NEED to find another Earth.
If we want to survive as a species, we need to become an interplanetary species.
We know that our planet won't be here forever:
if humanity won't destroy it first, a time will come when the Sun will do the job.
So, as soon as we find a new Earth, we have to start thinking about the journey to get to it
and hopefully build up a new life there. It's just a matter of finding it...
Thanks for watching everyone! What do you think about Kepler 1649c?
Do you believe we'll be able to colonize another planet one day?
Let me know in the comments below, be sure to subscribe,
and I'll see you next time on the channel!